Designing Lines Plan with Fastship

by Charles Roring in Manokwari of West Papua - Indonesia

As a naval architect, I have always found difficulties in manually delineating lines plan of a ship or a boat. Calculating the principle dimensions of a ship is easy. But delineating them on a lines plan drawing is a tedious task. While I was studying Naval Architecture (Teknik Perkapalan) in Pattimura University of Ambon city in Maluku islands, I did not have any lines plan drawing software at all. This is the biggest obstacle which most students of naval architecture faced. I think it still happen in my campus. Ship design software is still expensive for students of naval architecture in Teknik Perkapalan of Pattimura University.

In the past, most of naval architects will be very anxious if after presenting their design to ship owner, he or she would be asked for making some hull modification. The lengthening, shortening or trimming of a ship's hull will directly affect the whole coordinates of body-plan, waterlines and sections of a planned ship. Even a slight modification in the hull form will force a naval architect to recalculate the displacement, block coefficient, prismatic coefficient and water resistance of a ship and of course the internal general arrangement of a ship .

The reassessment or recalculation of ship resistance will affect the effective power of a ship and the type of engine that will be selected by the ship designer. Today's naval architect can make alterations of ship' hull in just a few clicks on a computer screen without having to spend many nights redrawing the lines plan and general arrangement of the modified ship.

I have downloaded a lines-plan development software from the internet. Its name is Fastship Software. It is developed by Proteus Engineering. There are many similar softwares available on the internet. One of them is Delfship or formerly known as Freeship. Many ship design software companies provide free trial software on the internet. I see this as a good offer to students of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering who are trying to design ships which are asked from them by their lecturers. I hope that most ship design software development companies will provide special offer to Naval Architecture educational institution which can be downloaded for free.

As a comparison, Graphisoft, a company that designs Archicad for home designer or architects provide their software for free for educational purposes. By doing this, the company has promoted its products to wider users expecting that in the future these new architects will keep on using their software in full version and full price.